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Wednesday, 18 December 2013

Deleuze, Plato and the simulucrum

Hey, hey! It's Christmas holidays so actually have time to update this blog, hooray! I thought I would share a couple of pieces of my work up here. This one is a talk/presentation type thing I gave on Deleuze, Plato and the simulucrum at Oxford. Fun fact! I actually hate Deleuze ( and any other model of impenetrable theory that is totally dislocated from reality) and totally did not volunteer to give a 20 minute talk on this dude but hey! I got to talk about Kanye so it's all good. [Also re: Django Unchained, the final paragraph refers solely to Samuel L Jackson's performance rather than Quentin Tarantino's, ahem, 'vision' of black culture as a whole].But yeah here it is! And I hope you are all well and happy :)tw: racism, anti-blackness

When reading Plato
and the Simulacrum I was struck, as I so often am when studying Deleuze, by the
sheer inaccessibility of the text. I could attribute this to the fact that is a
translation, a copy of the original, though so often I see that argument as a
guilt trip for the less educated among us (i.e. me). I suppose I harbor a
grumpy student conspiracy theory that with each step from the original text, a
piece of critical theory becomes more dense, like being lost in the black
forest in Germany, its neat equations of methodological pseudo-logic ironically
quickly become totally illogical and collapse in on themselves. And then soon
enough an hour has passed and I have been reading the same sentence over and
over and over and over and find myself wanting to use bad old cliché copies
like “stuck like a broken record” and making sort of stupid sort of smart,
definitely pretentious points about how staring at sentences without reading
them is the ultimate simulacrum or whatever. And it also occurs to me as I read
this that I don’t know how to pronounce simulacrum. So that’s awkward.

I think of the
physicist’s Lev Landau’s ranking scheme, where the further away from zero a
person is the further away from original thought they are, here the initial
ideas of others become more conflated, more complicated, until once reaching 5
they cease to make sense altogether.

This is the idea
of the simulacrum, which Nietzche put
forward, where life is traded in for language to create a totally wonky reality.
Because, when viewed objectively, the writing on the simulacra is in so many
cases a distorted copy of reality itself,
so far removed from life, so lost in academic and philosophical jargon, it really
does not make for coherent reading material

This brings me to
the idea of the Neoplatonic triad that Deleuze speaks of: the unshareable, the
shared, the sharer. This is the idea that “to share is, at best, to have
secondhand.” Rendering the retelling as a copy of the original because, “the
shared is what the unshareable possesses firsthand.”

To hide this inauthenticity
the sharer must create a new model of authenticity achieved through justifying
their credibility in one form or the other, for instance in education, in background
and so on. This is Deleuze’s idea that “the claimants must be judged and their
claim measured” in order to prove the authenticity of their idea. Because it's
easy to forget when reading someone like Baudrillard, or Plato, that text as
much as image is a copy of a lived experience and that writing is as much a flickering shadow on the wall as a
painting or sculpture (plato 215). For authors, as much
as artists, are parasites feeding off the real world to make their little reproductions.

I believe that in
writing, these tensions between fiction and reality, copy and original, culminate
in the fabricated misery memoir, and particularly fabricated texts that center
themselves around a 'literary minstrel show', by that I mean cases of white
people assuming the identities of people of color, and in the gulf between
assumed author and actual author creating an incredibly distorted portrait of
the community they claim to represent. This is the idea of simulacra as a false
messenger that perverts reality, turning its back to the original to create
something else entirely.

Here I think it is
appropriate to provide two real life case studies, because so often when
critical theory isn’t directly anchored to the so-called 'real world' it can
cease to mean anything outside of a hyper academic context.

-Firstly consider Love
and Consequences, a lurid memoir about a Native American girl living
in foster care. The narrator was originally taken from her birth family at five
because she was being sexually abused and is cared for by a Gone with the
Wind-esque, The Help-esque, black 'Mammy' character called Big Mom. It goes into
explicit detail of the brutalities of gang life under the Bloods in South
Central LA, speaking of murder, drug trafficking and even gang rape. Before
reaching it’s 'inspiring' conclusion of leaving the so called ghetto to go to college
and gain a degree in, and this part I find particularly amusing, ‘Ethnic
Studies’.

So this was written by Margaret
Seltzer (who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret Jones). It’s worth noting that while promoting the
book on radio shows she emulated a stereotypical African American Verancular,
referring to her so called gang members as her “homies” and “home girls”. It received a great review from the New
York Times praising it on how “humane” the writing was, comparing its intimate
details of urban poverty to that of an anthropologist documenting their environment.

However, shortly after the book
reached ‘critically acclaimed status’ the author was tragically revealed to be
a white woman who was educated at private school and grew up in Sherman Oaks,
an area so perfectly suburban Desperate Housewives chose to film their show
there. Here we are remind of Michael Camille’s point that the simulcra has no contact
whatsoever with the original (5) which by extension evokes Plato’s argument in
art and illusion that “the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what
he imitates” (316)

Love and Consequence’s publishers,
Riverhead books, who are a branch of Penguin USA, were so shocked by the
revelation that not only did they cancel her book tour, they recalled all of
the books and even went as far as offering refunds to anyone who had been
‘tricked’ into purchasing it. This
brings us back to Camille’s point that the Simulacra is an active threat to representation that, as Deleuze says,
must be stopped from bobbing up to the surface and freaking everyone out like
the shark in jaws (mc-35, d-5)

A similar sense of feeling betrayed
by the inauthentic world of the simulacrum can be seen when Amina Araf, creator
of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog detailing the civil uprising stage of the
Syrian civil war, turned out to be this guy:

A white middle aged American history
student named Tom McMaster who originally created the character as he felt it would
give himself more ‘credibility’ when discussing the politics of the Middle East
on online forums. The hoax was only revealed following McMaster claims that
Amina had been kidnapped, a claim that triggered a great amount of close media
attention to the blog.Journalists
eventually began to suspect if Amina was a hoax, a suspicion eventually
confirmed when a Croatian woman came forward saying that the images of Amina
were actually of herself. You see McMaster has found her photos online and saw
them as the perfect avatar for his Syrian blogger.

There is so much we could talk about
in terms of this hoax. However, in relation to the simulacrum, I think two
points stand out particularly. The appropriated image of the Croatian woman,
and the press attention, and later outrage, in regards to the simulated
kidnapping.

The photo example serves as a
striking example of Camille’s idea of “an image without a model”, a model built
on “false likeness” where resemblance is not an issue (MC 36). This embodies Plato’s idea of a shadow seeming realer than the
original, that an American man’s opinions on what a Syrian girl should look
like is more important than any actual Syrian girl (p-215). Here we’re reminded of Camille’s argument that
the simulacra is not a copy but an alternative (37). That if people of colour, particularly in the so called
‘third world’ are not ‘doing’ suffering poetically or photogenically enough they will be replaced by a simulacrum.

Here we can move onto the second example, the faked kidnapping of
McMaster’s Amina character. In this blurring of the fantasy event and the 'real
world' response we are provided with a powerful example of Baudrillard’s
argument in ‘precession of simulacra’ that people would “react more violently
to a simulated hold up than a real hold up”. Robbed of their 'third world' fantasy and presented with its real life author we can see why the British and
American press reacted so angrily. This passionate response to a completely
fictional character illustrates Camille’s point that the simulacrum disturbs a
person’s priorities, as we found when the British and American press reacted
more enthusiastically to Amina’s voice, Amina’s plight, than to the real
activists who are risking their lives in Syria.

Not only does this example serve as a
wonderful case study for Peter Steiner’s New Yorker cartoon, ‘on the internet
no one knows you’re a dog’ but it raises the question of whether the
simulacrum, in its unwavering dedication to the inauthentic provides us, as
Camille suggests with an “encounter with a different order of reality
entirely” (44-MC)

This argument can be seen in Monica Hesse,
Washington Post article in June 2011, here she argues:

"If [MacMaster] had not been so
emotionally resonant, so detailed, so seemingly 'real,' nobody would have cared
so much when Amina disappeared, and nobody would have worked so hard to figure
out what might have happened to her, and nobody would have learned that she was
a pale man from Georgia. Which meant that, at least according to a chilling and
narrow definition of what it means to be real on the Internet, Tom MacMaster
was very good indeed at being Amina."[39]

Because I would say that in their own specific brand of reality both Amina
and the Love and Consequences memoir are authentic-with
the ‘idea’ of race and its subsequent product (the memoir, the blog) being
perfectly aligned. After all race is a homogenized, flat pack construct, with
America’s vague definition of blackness, being, arguably, a product of slavery .
After all it was the colonizer not the colonized who created these borders, who
created these labels, so it makes perfect sense that the voices and images that
come from this idea are from this original group also.

So if our
conventional understanding of race is a white construct, which can be
identified in generic stereotypical ideas of blackness and Orientalist ideas of
the so called ‘Middle East’, then it is the white imitation that is the
original and the lived experience of people of color that is the distorted
copy. After all to be a person of color is by definition to be a perversion of
the original, whether that’s the light skinned high yellow model of blackness identified
in the character of Maureen Peal in the Bluest Eye or say Enid Blyton’s Little
Black Sambo whose dark skin washes off in the rain, we find that it is
whiteness that is always at the core of these images.

To speak honestly or
‘authentically’ in this dimension, without a conscious sense of editing and
filtering, is to set yourself up for failure, your words will be rejected and you
will be branded as not just inauthentic but a raving lunatic. Kanye West serves as a powerful example of this, in a
recent BBC Radio One interview with Zane Lowe he spoke openly about his
struggles as a black creative, how difficult it was to be taken seriously as an
individual when people couldn’t see beyond the construct of what a black man in
America ‘should’ be. In response the American comedian Jimmy Kimmel parodied
the interview in a comedy sketch, hiring a child to read out the original
interview transcript, thus confirming Kanye West’s initial argument, by
reducing the artist to the racist stereotype of the American black man as a screaming,
hysterical child with little, to no, self control.

Of course, when the simulacrum is such a powerful one it will consume
anything in its path, disregarding context or intention. Look at how this image
still from the sitcom ‘Everybody Hates Chris’ is warped by a well meaning user
of the image sharing site tumblr:

However, it’s important to remember that Deleuze, unlike Plato or
Baudrillard , also spoke of the simulcrum’s positive power, particularly its
potential for subversion. So, in finishing up this presentation I think it’s
appropriate to end on a positive note, remembering how the simulacrum can be
used to break down racist constructs on what an authentic person of color should
be. After all, whilst we should be deeply critical of
the Amina’s of the world, it is equally reductive to fetishise an unrealistic
fantasy of the authentic narrative, which is itself arguably also a simulucrum.

In this sense
instead of reacting against this model in an essentialist, binary manner, as
seen in Nation of Islam leaders such as Louis Farrakahn. We should, instead, remember the advice of Maya Angelou that
“anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the
Principle of Reverse.”

This can be seen in
my final example, Samuel L Jackson’s subversive interpretation of the
surbordinate house slave trope in Django Unchained. In this second hand
simulacrum model all principles are inverted, and Jackson’s exaggerated
performance of passivity becomes his power, allowing him to actively manipulate
his so called master by applying the Uncle Tom trope to his advantage. This
reminds us that in consciously acting the fool you can exploit and expose the
ruling systems of oppression, and by extension the realms of the inauthentic,
which keeps this belief system in its place.